Stephen F. Soitos
The Blues Detective: A Study of African American Detective Fiction
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. Pp. 260. $40.00
Reviewed by Sylvie Chavanelle

In a work of literary history and criticism, Soitos, intent on proving that black culture in America should not be overlooked, sets out to trace the continuity as well as the evolution in the detective fiction written by African-Americans. Although he does not break new ground-he draws upon the canonical works of famous critics, such as Houston Baker and Henry Louis Gates-he develops his argument unflinchingly, albeit a little slowly and didactically. The chronological structure of this book offers an interesting survey of the detective genre, with illuminating comparisons between detective stories written by white and black authors; and its clear, sometimes redundant, explanations of traditional perspectives on the subject make it accessible to the layman besides giving the specialist of detective fiction an insight into African-American writing, and the specialist of African-American culture an insight into the detective mode.

Soitos first defines the conventions of detective fiction initiated by Edgar A. Poe in the 1840s. He traces its origins in the urban romance, the English rogue novel and the Spanish picaresque story. The stories by Poe, and by Conan Doyle, who followed in his footsteps, are regarded today as the “classical” model, which was turned by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler in the 1920s and 1930s in America into the “hardboiled” mode.

Soitos examines how detectives stories by black authors, first published in cheap magazines like The Black Mask, then as novels, stick to or swerve from these two categories invented by white males, and how some laid the foundation for black detective fiction after the twenties. It appears that African-Americans at once borrow from the Euro-Americentric popular detective formulas and convert them to suit their goals. All incorporate vernacular elements enhancing their sociocultural background, the beliefs and values which helped them survive and resist white oppression.

Hence their fiction contains four tropes which recur more or less vividly, depending on the novels and the authors: the black detective persona, double-conscious detection (the ability to see the world through the eyes of blacks and whites, related to duplicity and the trickster figure), black “vernaculars” (a term used by Soitos to cover not only black speech patterns but all expressive arts from music and dance to food), and hoodoo. As black detective writers twist or pastiche the norms set up by the whites and substitute their own versions, they assert their identity, reinterpret the past, and probe issues of race, class, and gender from another angle.

After delineating the paradigm of detective fiction and expatiating on African-American tropes, Soitos devotes several chapters to the study of individual authors. Around the turn of the century, Pauline Hopkins, with Hagar’s Daughter, was the first black woman to give an unbiased depiction of blacks, to create a complex detective persona (or “blues detective”), and to stress the role of the family and the community. She combined stock elements of the detective genre with a black perspective based on black idiom and the indictment of a corrupt social system. Similarly, J. E. Bruce in Black Sleuth used detective fiction to expose political and social problems. He highlighted Afrocentrism and black pride, thereby broadening the detective tradition.

During the Harlem Renaissance, Rudolf Fisher carried on in the same vein. The Conjure Man Dies focused on Harlem, the “city within a city” which became a metaphor for a new approach to blackness and primitivism. His sense of comedy and his experimentation with double detection and hoodoo practices paved the way for the most prolific black detective writer, Chester Himes, whose ten novels evolved a new aesthetic dramatically altering the detective tradition. Based on a violent reality with which he was personally familiar, his “Harlem domestic series” is infused with the absurdity of racism and a satire of the whites as well as the blacks. The purpose of all these authors was to counterpoise the dominant power structures and to handle irony, humor, and fantasy to challenge mainstream stereotypes. The next stage was embodied by the postmodern “anti-detective novels” of the 1970s, Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed and Reflex and Bone Structure by Clarence Major, which disorient the readers and urge them to work their way through intricate puzzles. Plot, characters, time frame, and language are pared down to the basics, thus taking on greater significance and questioning the very nature of writing and understanding.

At a time when the readership of detective stories is growing, when this genre is attracting new critical interest and when the uniqueness of black culture needs to be re-affirmed, Soitos’s work aptly gives a panoramic view of the “blues detective” writing. Now that the revision of traditional models has come full circle, reaching a metaphysical and metafictional plane, how will the new generation of detective writers demonstrate the vigor of black creativity?